Friday, July 7, 2017

Our “feature” was Logan,
ninth and (presumably) last of the X-Men series movies in which Hugh Jackman portrays the character of
Wolverine, a biologically engineered assassin whose big trademark is that when
he needs an invulnerable weapon, claws made of a synthetic metal called
adamantium emerge from between his regular fingers, and these are sharp enough
he can literally decapitate
someone with them. The film was released earlier this year, and if your idea of
a superhero film is a joyous romp through various elaborate action sequences
with clearly defined heroes and villains, this is definitely not your movie. Indeed, it’s so relentlessly dark that
the Blu-Ray package includes three
discs, alternate Blu-Ray and DVD versions of the film as theatrically released
plus a third Blu-Ray disc with something called Logan Noir, which is the same movie in
black-and-white. Of this smorgasbord of options we watched the color version of
the Blu-Ray, and while much of it was in the dirty brown-and-green color scheme
that seems to be modern-day cinematographers’ default look for virtually everything, a) there were a few shots that contained bright colors (including a sequence set at
the “Liberty Motel” that seemed to me inspired by the “Victory Motel” climax at
the end of L.A. Confidential) and
b) the entire look of the film was so dark for once that dirty brown-and-green
look was actually appropriate.

Basically, Logan is a “road movie” in which Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine
(Hugh Jackman) is working as a limo driver just across the U.S. border in
Mexico. He’s also taking care of Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart),
who since the destruction of his school for mutant kids in Westchester has been
reduced to a pathetic existence living inside a giant oil tank and being kept shot
up with drugs because he can no longer control his mental energies and unless
he’s kept perpetually sedated he could send off “psionic” emissions that would
be dangerous to anyone in his vicinity. In the opening sequence Logan is confronted
by a Mexican street gang that wants to steal his limo, and he fights them off
but in the process “outs” himself and reveals his whereabouts to the sinister
corporate leader Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), head of a company called
“Transigen” (a marvelously evocative name suggesting “intransigent,”
“transgenic” — a euphemism for “genetically modified” — and “transgender”). The
film is set in 2029 (though, as a number of imdb.com contributors noted, aside
from the specially modified Chrysler limo Logan drives in the opening scenes
the cars shown are all modern-day models with no attempt to make them look like
cars from 12 years in the future) and in the universe in which it takes place,
no new mutants have been born in the last 25 years. Given how effectively the
whole X-Men premise has been used
in previous films as a sort of metaphor for the Queer experience — particularly
the anti-mutant repression as well as the internal dilemma every mutant faces
as to whether to remain closeted or come out — the situation in Logan reflects the fear of a lot of Queer people that
scientific research aimed at finding out why people are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
or Transgender could be used as a means to eliminate us altogether from future
generations.

In the early parts of Logan it’s a mystery why no natural mutants have been born in the previous
quarter-century, but midway through the movie Pierce explains that he and his
fellow corporate baddies have deliberately contaminated humans’ food supplies
with genetically modified corn syrup and other nasties that have prevented the
mutations that created the X-Men in the first place from ever happening again.
But that hasn’t been enough for the dark forces at Transigen: they’ve also
bioengineered their own mutants,
and one of them, manufactured from Logan’s DNA and therefore biologically his
daughter, is Laura (Dafne Keen), who looks about 12. Laura’s mother Gabriela
(Elizabeth Rodriguez) offers him $50,000 to take her and her daughter to North
Dakota, site of the fictional “Eden,” supposedly a place where mutants can live
unmolested by the forces of big government and big business that are out to
enslave and/or slaughter them all. Logan insists that “Eden” doesn’t really
exist — it’s just a fantasy created by the writers of the X-Men comic books (one of the things I like about this
movie is the metafictional way the X-Men comics are incorporated into the story, much the way Michael Connelly
incorporated into subsequent “Lincoln Lawyer” series books the fact that the
first one was filmed — the “real” character in the later novels even boasts
that Matthew McConaughey played him in the movie!) — but Laura insists that
it’s real and Logan must take her there even though all the money she has is
the $20,000 her mom gave Logan before she was killed. The film basically is a
race across country between Logan, Laura and Xavier in a variety of trucks,
each one seemingly skuzzier and more decrepit than the last; and the combined
forces of Donald Pierce and his big-government and big-business allies (Logan clearly has elements of political allegory, but like
a lot of other recent movies and TV shows it can be read either as a Left-wing
parable about the evils of capitalism or a Right-wing one about the freedom of
the individual against an oppressive government), who in order to trace Logan
have kidnapped Caliban (Stephen Merchant, looking a lot like the “Riff Raff”
character Richard O’Brien played in the original Rocky Horror Picture
Show), the fellow mutant who was living
with Logan in the Mexican desert and helping him take care of Xavier in the
opening scenes.

There’s a horrifying moment in which, in order to keep the
albino Caliban under his thumb, Pierce throws open a window in his enclosure
and exposes him to sunlight — and Caliban’s skin quickly turns red and blotchy,
a condition that’s obviously going to kill him if it’s allowed to continue. One
of the most fascinating aspects of Logan is the sheer extent of the armed forces Pierce is able to marshal
whenever they find Logan’s whereabouts — reason enough that it appears he’s in
league with the government, having already wiped out the natural mutants and
being committed to recapture his genetically engineered ones at their redoubt
in North Dakota, while they’re equally committed to sneaking across the border
into Canada, where they will at least theoretically be safe. (Of course, in
real life someone as unscrupulous as Pierce wouldn’t bother to stop his
military campaign just because a borderline was in his way.) What sets Logan apart from other superhero movies is its unrelieved
gloominess: we know that the good guys are being so relentlessly pursued by the
bad guys that there’s no rest for the non-wicked in this film, and even when
they appear to have found a temporary sanctuary — like the Vegas-style casino
to which they briefly repair (and there are marvelous shots contrasting the
bedraggled fugitives with the well-dressed tourists who are the place’s main
customer base — I had assumed they’d actually driven to Vegas but according to
imdb.com, the location is actually a Native American casino in Oklahoma) and
where Xavier has a psionic outburst that literally causes the casino walls, as
well as everyone inside, to shake (an effect created, according to an imdb.com
“trivia” poster, by shooting the footage hand-held, deliberately making it
shaky, and then using post-production technology to re-stabilize the frame,
disorienting the audience as well as the characters with the combination of
motion blur and smearing created by the effect) — their past and their uncertain
present catch up with them.

The film’s most tragic sequence is when Logan,
Laura and Xavier meet up with an African-American family, Will Munson (Eriq
LaSalle), his wife Kathryn (Elise Neal) and their son Nate (Quincy Fouse), when
their truck has been run off the road and the horse trailers they were towing
have come open, letting the horses out. Logan is reluctantly talked into
helping him by Xavier, not wanting to get involved and wanting even less to
inflict his rotten luck on yet more decent people who are just going to end up
as collateral damage (“Bad shit happens to people I care about,” Logan explains
to Laura) — as indeed they do, as Logan helps Will in a fight against local
rednecks who’ve just cut off the access to water he needs to run his farm. He
takes out some of the rednecks, slicing one’s head off in a gruesome scene that
would be even more horrific if director James Mangold didn’t get it on and off
screen in such a hurry, but this alerts Pierce and his minions to Wolverine’s
presence and the result is a bloodbath in which, this being an X-Men movie, the nice people all die. In the end the
“Eden” redoubt actually exists and Laura is reunited with her old friends from
the These Are the Damned-style
Transigen compound in which she grew up, but in the final scene they have to
make a run across the Canadian border and Logan [spoiler alert!] deliberately O.D.’s on the drug that potentiates his
super-powers and wards off the toxic effects of all that adamantium in his
body, thereby getting his young charges across the border at the sacrifice of
his own life. This doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be another Wolverine film — not only is this a
fantasy, which means that just because you actually see a character die you
can’t assume you won’t see them again, but at least two other characters, Laura
and Pierce’s assassin, have the Wolverine mutation — though Hugh Jackman gave a
number of interviews when this film came out swearing up and down that this
will be, cross his heart and hope to die, his last appearance as Wolverine.
(Yeah, right, I thought: if the
producers dangle a check in front of him and the amount has enough zeroes at
the end of it, I’m sure he’ll play the part again.)

Jackman is one of my
favorite modern-day actors — though my support of him comes largely from his
brilliant performance in a tragically little-known film, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (and even there he was playing a character similar
to Wolverine, a man of mystery who helps out a heroine in distress while
himself remaining forbidding and remote) — but I can tell he’s getting as tired
of the role as Lon Chaney, Jr. got of the Wolf Man (and there are similarities,
especially the growling noises Wolverine emits as he transforms from normal
human being into mutant killing machine), especially since about the only
emotions he can register in the part are alienation and angst. Still, even though much of Logan is pretty slow going, I really liked the film:
Mangold, who’d previously worked on the series in another Jackman vehicle, The
Wolverine, directs superbly — and the
script is also based on his story, though he directly collaborated with another
writer, Scott Frank, on turning it into a screenplay and a third scribe,
Michael Green, was brought in for subsequent revisions. Mangold’s résumé is
full of movies about people put in extreme circumstances, many times skirting
the thin edge of sanity — Girl, Interrupted, Cop Land, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (in a sort of odd directorial trademark, the song we
hear during the first part of the closing credits is one of Cash’s last
records, “The Man Comes Around,” credited to Cash as songwriter but obviously a
variant on the old spiritual “There’s a Man Goin’ ’Round Takin’ Names”) — and
his two collaborations with Jackman as Wolverine are clearly in that line. The
acting in this movie is well done, despite Jackman’s occasional hints of
boredom with the role; Patrick Stewart plays well as a shrunken (literally;
director Mangold wanted him to lose weight to suggest the character’s decrepit
state — and also to make it easier for Jackman to lift him and carry him
around, which happens several times in the film) version of the once powerful
Master of the X-Men; and Dafne Keen as Laura is great, refreshingly unsentimental
(it’s taken decades for the
malign influence of Shirley Temple to wear off and allow filmmakers to depict
children as multidimensional characters instead of drowning them all in gooey
sweetness) and strong-willed. I’m going to make the same prediction about her I
made (accurately) about Kirsten Dunst after Interview with the
Vampire: she’ll have a great career as an
adult actress.